188 VOLUNTEER POLICE FOR PROVINCE WELLESLEY. 
the villagers are excessively ignorant, and they suffer seriously 
from their ignorance. Their want of sanitary knowledge and - 
habits is so great that they may be said to cultivate the diseases 
that originate in or are fomented by dirt and insufficient ventila- 
tion.* The overcrowding of both sexes in small huts incites 
to immoralities from which their religious scruples are not always 
strong enough to deter them. ‘Their ignorance of the real charac- 
ter of the Government exposes them to misrepresentations and 
malpractices, and disables them from using the means of redress 
which the law provides. While seeing little of educated Europeans, 
they are sought out by Chinese, Klings and Malays who are fi- 
nished in the knowledge and craft acquired in that great school 
of cheating under the guise of honest mercantile thrift, piety or 
good nature—an Asiatic seaport where traders of all nations con- 
gregate. From an experience extending over thirty years in 
which I have been almost constantly in close and unreserved 
intercourse with the Natives, much of it professional and con- 
fidential, I do not hesitate to say that the more stupid and ignorant 
are defrauded on all hands by the more knowing and crafty. The 
more ignorant Malay cannot sell his paddy to a Chinese without 
being cheated, in the confusion to which the illegai but universal 
use of measures of different sizes and his narrow powers of cal- 
culation expose him. Government in its Acts and Regulations 
lays careful and elaborate plans to protect him from exactions on 
the part of its subordinates, but these very plans defeat their 
end, and become means to fresh exactions. So low in the scale 
reaches the belief of the Malay rustic in the power of every 
servant of Government to do him good or harm according as he 
is treated, that he never thinks of questioning the right of even 
a convict in the Survey Department to a fee for drawing the 
measuring chain over his land or serving him with a notice, or 
that of a convict in the Engineer’s Department to take his bamboos 
and plantains without payment. There are usually so many steps 
between the issue of an order by the head of a Department and its © 
actual execution, that nothing he can do will secure the more ignor- 
ant Natives affected by it from being defrauded either by some of | 
his subordinates, or by other persons acting, or professing to act, 
for them. I make no doubt, to take one Department, that the 
Malay holders of small lots have, first and last and in one way and 
* Hence the frightful extent to which various disgusting cutaneous dis- 
eases prevail in every village and almost in every bouse, and the great mortali- 
ty, effectually checking the natural increase of the population, from fever, 
small-pox, diarrhea and cholera. 
